Riley Lee

Riley Kelly Lee (born 1951) is an American-born Australian-based shakuhachi player and teacher. In 1980 he became the first non-Japanese person to attain the rank of Dai Shihan (grand master) in the shakuhachi tradition. He is a recipient of two of the most revered lineages of shakuhachi playing, descending from the original Zen Buddhist 'priests of nothingness' of Edo. His first teachers were Hoshida Ichizan II and Chikuho Sakai II. His present teacher is Katsuya Yokoyama.

Riley Lee was born in Plainview, Texas, of a Chinese father and Caucasian mother. He moved to Shawnee, Oklahoma in 1957, where, aged 13, he became the bass player of the award winning rock band "The Workouts". He and his family moved to Hawaii in 1966. He first heard the shakuhachi in 1967 while attending high school in Hawaii, on an LP recording brought home by his elder brother. About the same time, his father gave him a dongxiao, a Chinese bamboo flute whose ancestry is shared with the shakuhachi, and taught him an old Chinese folksong on it.

He first went to Japan in 1970, and returned in 1971, when he began his shakuhachi studies. He lived there continuously until 1977. From 1973 through 1977, he toured internationally as a fulltime performer of taiko (festival drums) and shakuhachi with Ondekoza (now called Kodo), a group of traditional Japanese musicians. They performed with such groups as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and at venues such as Kennedy Center, Roundhouse Theatre (London), Espace Pierre Cardin (Paris), and the Boston Symphony Hall.

After returning to Honolulu with his wife Patricia in 1978, he began teaching privately and performing. He founded the Chikuho School of Shakuhachi of Hawaii. He was a lecturer of the shakuhachi at the University of Hawaii, where he completed his BA and MA degrees. They left for Australia in 1986 so that he could take up a PhD fellowship in ethnomusicology (on the transmission of the Zen Buddhist repertoire of the shakuhachi) at the University of Sydney. His PhD dissertation is published by UMI (USA). He was an East-West Center grantee in 1985-1986 and a Japan Foundation fellow in 1988-1989. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the University of Western Sydney in 1997.

He has published scholarly articles and book reviews in leading national and international musicology journals, such as Ethnomusicology and Asian Music. He has translated for journals such as Contemporary Music Review.

He has been instrumental in creating a professional presence of traditional Japanese music in Australia. He has introduced the shakuhachi to a diverse audience as both a soloist and with other performers of such instruments as harp, cello, saxophone, tabla, guitar, didgeridoo, and symphony orchestra. He helped found the Australian Shakuhachi Society in 1996. His request in 1988 to the Sawai Koto School in Japan that a koto player be sent to Australia facilitated the immigration to Australia of Satsuki Odamura.

In 1995, with Ian Cleworth, he co-founded TaikOz, a Japanese festival drum group based in Australia. It has since become one of Australia's premier performance groups, acclaimed both at home and in Japan. He performed with the Sydney Dance Company in the 1999 Australian season of Graham Murphy's "Air and Other Invisible Forces", touring the USA at the end of 2000 and Europe in 2001 with this production. He has made over 50 recordings internationally, many featuring his own compositions.

On 1 January 2000, Riley Lee was seen, with five other musicians, on an internationally televised program, ushering in the new millennium from the top of the sails of the Sydney Opera House. In 2002 and 2003, Riley Lee performed in Hawaii, New Mexico, Texas, California, England, Austria, Switzerland, and Japan, and gave numerous concerts throughout Australia, as well as in the Woodford and National Folk Festivals, Adelaide Festival, and the Sacred Music Festival in Brisbane. In 2003, he was Visiting Fellow at Princeton University, New Jersey, the first shakuhachi player ever to be so honoured. He has been given a second Fellowship at Princeton, and will be lecturing in the Comparative Literature Department during the spring semester (Feb-June) 2009.

He is the Artistic Director and Chair of the Executive Committee of the World Shakuhachi Festival 2008, a four day event held in Sydney 4-8 July 2008, at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the City Recital Hall. The event featured thirty concerts, workshops, forums, seminars and other events. Seventy of the world's leading shakuhachi players attended as invited performers, making it the largest event in the history of the shakuhachi.

With TaikOz and Synergy, he performed Gerard Brophy's "The Book of Clouds", a work commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Riley Lee started teaching breathing workshops in the late 1980s, at the suggestion of one of his students, well-known Sydney acupuncturist Ross Penman. Riley has since refined and expanded his repertoire of exercises, gleaned from a number of sources and from his long and focused relationship with shakuhachi. The exercises are designed to create an awareness of one's breath while at the same time, improving the strength and control of the muscles used in breathing. His workshops last from one to six hours, and single sessions have been attended by as many as two thousand people.

Patricia and Riley's twin daughters, Aiyana and Marieke, were born in 1979 in Kahuku, Oahu. He and his family live in Sydney and in Hawaii.

External links

* [http://www.komuso.com/people/Lee,_Dr_Riley_Kelly.html The International Shakuhachi Society - Biography: Lee, Dr Riley Kelly]
* [http://www.rileylee.net/biography.html Riley Lee - Sound of Bamboo]